Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez
Born	(1599-06-06)June 6, 1599 Seville
Died	August 6, 1660(1660-08-06) (aged 61) Madrid
Occupations	painter, artist, visual artist

For other uses, see Diego Velázquez (disambiguation).

"Velázquez" redirects here. For other uses, see Velázquez (disambiguation).

Velázquez portrayed himself, painting, in 1656 in his most emblematic picture: Las Meninas. In the sleeves of his garment and in his right hand his rapid, sketchy late style can be appreciated. On his palette we can distinguish the few colors he used in his paintings. The cross of the Order of Santiago that he wears on his chest was added to the painting later.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (Seville, June 5, 1599 – Madrid, August 6, 1660), known as Diego Velázquez, was a Spanish Baroque painter considered one of the greatest exponents of Spanish painting and a master of universal painting.

Velázquez spent his early years in Seville, where he developed a naturalistic style with tenebrist lighting, under the influence of Caravaggio and his followers.

At the age of 24 he moved to Madrid, where he was appointed painter to King Philip IV, and four years later he was promoted to painter of the chamber, the most important post among the court painters. He devoted the rest of his life to this work. His task consisted of painting portraits of the King and his family, as well as other pictures intended to decorate the royal residences. His presence at court allowed him to study the royal collection of paintings which, together with the lessons of his first journey to Italy, where he came to know both ancient painting and that of his own time, were decisive influences in his evolution toward a style of great luminosity, with rapid and loose brushstrokes.

In his maturity, from 1631 onward, he painted great works in this manner, such as The Surrender of Breda. In his last decade his style became more schematic and sketch-like, attaining an extraordinary mastery of light. This period was inaugurated with the Portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted during his second journey to Italy, and to it belong his last two masterpieces: Las Meninas and The Spinners.

His catalog consists of some 120 or 130 works. His recognition as a universal painter came late, around 1850. He reached his greatest fame between 1880 and 1920, coinciding with the era of the French Impressionist painters, for whom he was a point of reference. Manet was amazed by his work and described him as the "painter of painters" and "the greatest painter who has ever lived." The core of his paintings that formed part of the royal collection is preserved in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Biographical overview

Early years in Seville

Church of San Pedro (Seville). Baptismal chapel in which Diego Velázquez was baptized

Diego Velázquez was baptized on June 6, 1599, in the Church of San Pedro in Seville. Regarding his date of birth, Bardi ventures to say, without giving further details, that he was probably born the day before his baptism, that is, on June 5, 1599.

His parents were Juan Rodríguez de Silva, born in Seville, though of Portuguese origin (his paternal grandparents, Diego Rodríguez and María Rodríguez de Silva, had settled in the city coming from Porto), and Jerónima Velázquez, a native of Seville. They had married in the same Church of San Pedro on December 28, 1597. Diego, the firstborn, would be the eldest of eight siblings. Velázquez, like his brother Juan, also a "painter of religious imagery," adopted his mother's surname according to the custom widespread in Andalusia, although around the middle of his life he also on occasion signed "Silva Velázquez," using his father's second surname.

His birthplace in Seville

It has been asserted that the family belonged to the minor hidalgo nobility of the city. However, and despite Velázquez's noble pretensions, there is not sufficient evidence to confirm it. His father, perhaps a hidalgo, was an ecclesiastical notary, an occupation that could only correspond to the lowest levels of the nobility, and, according to Camón Aznar, he must have lived extremely modestly, close to poverty. His maternal grandfather, Juan Velázquez Moreno, was a hosier, a mechanical trade incompatible with nobility, although he was able to put some savings into real estate investments. The painter's relatives alleged as proof of hidalgo status that, from 1609, the City of Seville had begun to reimburse his great-grandfather Andrés for the levy on "la blanca de la carne," a consumption tax that only pecheros were required to pay, and in 1613 the same began to be done for his father and grandfather. Velázquez himself was exempt from paying it from the time he came of age. However, this exemption was not judged sufficient proof of nobility by the Council of Military Orders when, in the 1650s, proceedings were opened to determine Velázquez's alleged hidalgo status, which was recognized only for his paternal grandfather, of whom it was said that he had been held as such in Portugal and Galicia.

Apprenticeship

The Seville in which the painter was trained was the richest and most populous city in Spain, as well as the most cosmopolitan and open city of the Empire. It held the monopoly on trade with America and had an important colony of Flemish and Italian merchants. It was also an ecclesiastical see of great importance and had great painters.

His talent emerged at a very early age. Having just turned ten, according to Antonio Palomino, he began his training in the workshop of Francisco Herrera the Elder, a prestigious painter in 17th-century Seville, but of very bad temper, whom the young pupil supposedly could not bear. His stay in Herrera's workshop, which has not been documented, must necessarily have been very short, since in October 1611 Juan Rodríguez signed the "letter of apprenticeship" of his son Diego with Francisco Pacheco, binding him to Pacheco for a period of six years, counting from December 1610, when his actual entry into the workshop of the man who would become his father-in-law may have taken place.

In the workshop of Pacheco, a painter linked to the ecclesiastical and intellectual circles of Seville, Velázquez acquired his first technical training and his aesthetic ideas. The apprenticeship contract set the usual conditions of service: the young apprentice, lodged in the master's house, was to serve him "in your said house and in everything else that you tell and order him that is honest and possible for him to do," orders that usually included grinding colors, heating glues, decanting varnishes, stretching canvases and assembling stretchers, among other duties. The master, in exchange, undertook to give the apprentice food, lodging and bed, to clothe and shoe him, and to teach him "the art well and fully, as you know it, without concealing anything of it from him."

The painters under whom he was an apprentice

Francisco Herrera the Elder.
Saint Bonaventure Receives the Habit of Saint Francis.

Francisco Pacheco.
Last Judgment.

Pacheco was a man of broad culture, the author of an important treatise, El arte de la pintura (The Art of Painting), which he did not live to see published. As a painter he was rather limited, a faithful follower of the models of Raphael and Michelangelo, interpreted in a hard and dry manner. As a draftsman, however, he produced excellent portraits in pencil. Even so, he knew how to guide his disciple without limiting his abilities. Pacheco is better known for his writings and for being Velázquez's master than as a painter. In his important treatise, published posthumously in 1649 and indispensable for understanding the Spanish artistic life of the period, he shows himself faithful to the idealist tradition of the previous 16th century and little inclined toward the advances of Flemish and Italian naturalist painting. Nevertheless, he shows his admiration for the painting of his son-in-law and praises the bodegones with figures of marked naturalistic character that he painted in his early years. He had great prestige among the clergy and was very influential in the literary circles of Seville that brought together the local nobility.

This is how Pacheco described this period of apprenticeship: "With this doctrine (of drawing) my son-in-law, Diego Velásques de Silva, was raised as a boy; he had bribed a little peasant apprentice who served him as a model in various actions and postures, now weeping, now laughing, without sparing any difficulty. And he made of him many heads in charcoal with highlights on blue paper, and of many other models from life, with which he gained sureness in portraiture."

None of the drawings he must have made of this apprentice has survived, but the repetition of the same faces and people in some of his works of this period is significant (see, for example, the boy on the left in Old Woman Frying Eggs or in The Waterseller of Seville).

Justi, the first great specialist on the painter, considered that in the brief time he spent with Herrera, the latter must have transmitted to him the initial impulse that gave him greatness and singularity. He must have taught him "freedom of hand," which Velázquez would not attain until years later in Madrid, although free execution was already a known feature in his time and had previously been found in El Greco. Possibly his first master served him as an example in the search for his own style, since the analogies found between the two are only of a general character. In Diego's first works one finds a strict draftsmanship attentive to capturing the exactness of the model's reality, with severe modeling, totally opposed to the loose contours of the tumultuous fantasy of Herrera's figures. He continued his apprenticeship with a totally different master. Just as Herrera was a born painter of strong temperament, Pacheco was learned but little of a painter, and what he valued most was orthodoxy. Justi concluded, on comparing their pictures, that Pacheco exercised little artistic influence on his disciple. He must have exercised greater influence on him in theoretical matters, both of an iconographic nature, for example in his defense of the Crucifixion with four nails, and with regard to the recognition of painting as a noble and liberal art, as opposed to the merely artisanal character with which it was perceived by most of his contemporaries.

It should be noted, nonetheless, that had he been a disciple of Herrera the Elder, he would have been so at the beginning of Herrera's career, when the latter was about twenty years old and had not even taken his examination as a painter, which he would only do in 1619, and precisely before Francisco Pacheco. Jonathan Brown, who does not take into consideration the supposed period of training with Herrera, points to another possible early influence, that of Juan de Roelas, present in Seville during Velázquez's years of apprenticeship. Having received important ecclesiastical commissions, Roelas introduced into Seville the incipient naturalism of the Escorial, different from that practiced by the young Velázquez.

His beginnings as a painter

Immaculate Conception, c. 1618 (National Gallery, London)

Adoration of the Magi, 1619. It is thought that his models were his family: thus the Christ Child would be his daughter Francisca, the Virgin his wife Juana, Melchior his father-in-law Pacheco, and Caspar would be Velázquez himself.

Having completed his apprenticeship, on March 14, 1617, he passed, before Juan de Uceda and Francisco Pacheco, the examination that allowed him to join the guild of painters of Seville. He received a license to practice as a "master of religious imagery and in oil," being able to practice his art throughout the kingdom, keep a public shop and hire apprentices. The scant documentation preserved from his Seville period, relating almost exclusively to family matters and financial transactions, which indicate a certain family comfort, offers only one piece of information related to his profession as a painter: the apprenticeship contract that Alonso Melgar, father of Diego Melgar, aged thirteen or fourteen, signed in the first days of February 1620 with Velázquez so that he would teach the boy his trade.

Before turning 19, on April 23, 1618, he married in Seville Juana Pacheco, daughter of Francisco Pacheco, who was 15 years old, having been born on June 1, 1602. His two daughters were born in Seville: Francisca, baptized on May 18, 1619, and Ignacia, baptized on January 29, 1621. It was common among the painters of Seville of his time to unite through family ties, thus forming a network of interests that facilitated work and commissions.

His great quality as a painter was already evident in his first works, executed when he was only 18 or 19 years old: bodegones with figures such as The Lunch in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, or the Old Woman Frying Eggs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, whose subject and technique were totally alien to anything being done in Seville, and opposed moreover to the models and theoretical precepts of his master, who nonetheless was to make, as a result of them, a defense of the pictorial genre of the bodegón:

Are bodegones not to be esteemed? Of course they are, if they are painted as my son-in-law paints them, rising to mastery in this field without leaving room for others, and they deserve the very greatest esteem; for with these beginnings and with portraits, of which we will speak later, he found the true imitation of nature, encouraging the spirits of many with his powerful example.

In these early years he developed an extraordinary mastery, revealing his interest in mastering the imitation of nature, achieving the representation of relief and of textures by means of a chiaroscuro technique reminiscent of the naturalism of Caravaggio, although it is unlikely that the young Velázquez could have come to know any of the Italian painter's works. In his pictures a strong directed light accentuates the volumes and simple objects that appear prominently in the foreground. The genre picture or bodegón, of Flemish origin, of which Velázquez may have known the engravings of Jacob Matham, and the so-called pittura ridicola, practiced in northern Italy by artists such as Vincenzo Campi, with its representation of everyday objects and vulgar types, may have helped him develop these aspects as well as the chiaroscuro lighting. Proof of the early reception in Spain of paintings of this genre is found in the work of a modest painter from Úbeda named Juan Esteban.

In addition, the early Velázquez may have known works by El Greco, by his disciple Luis Tristán, a practitioner of a personal chiaroscuro, and by a portraitist little known today, Diego de Rómulo Cincinnato, of whom Pacheco wrote in praise.

The Saint Thomas in the Museum of Fine Arts of Orléans and the Saint Paul in the National Art Museum of Catalonia would show his knowledge of the first two. The Sevillian clientele, mostly ecclesiastical, demanded religious subjects, devotional pictures and portraits, and so the painter's production at this time also focused on religious commissions, such as the Immaculate Conception in the National Gallery in London and its companion piece, the Saint John on Patmos, both from the convent of the Calced Carmelites of Seville, with a marked sense of volume and an evident taste for the textures of materials; the Adoration of the Magi in the Museo del Prado, or the The Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonsus in the City Council of Seville. Velázquez, however, sometimes approached religious subjects in the same way as his bodegones with figures, as in the Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the National Gallery in London or in The Supper at Emmaus in the National Gallery of Ireland, also known as La mulata, of which a replica, possibly autograph, in the Art Institute of Chicago suppresses the religious motif, reduced to a secular bodegón. This way of interpreting nature allowed him to reach the depths of his subjects, showing early on a great capacity for portraiture, conveying the inner strength and temperament of the sitters. Thus in the portrait of Sister Jerónima de la Fuente of 1620, of which two versions of great intensity are known, in which he conveys the energy of this nun who at the age of 70 set out from Seville to found a convent in the Philippines.

The Old Woman Frying Eggs of 1618 and The Waterseller of Seville, executed around 1620, are considered masterpieces of this period. In the first he demonstrates his mastery in the row of objects in the foreground through a strong, intense light that brings out surfaces and textures. The second, a picture he took to Madrid and gave to Juan Fonseca, who helped him establish himself at court, has excellent effects: the large earthenware jug catches the light on its horizontal grooves while small transparent drops of water slide down its surface.

First style

Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618)

The Waterseller of Seville (1620)

Jerónima de la Fuente (1620)

This stage is characterized by the predominance of the tenebrist technique, with strongly lit figures standing out in the foreground against a dark background. He used thick paint that completely covered the canvas.

His works, especially his bodegones, had great influence on contemporary Sevillian painters, and a large number of copies and imitations of them exist. Of the twenty works preserved from this period, nine can be considered bodegones.

Rapid recognition at court

On his first visit to Madrid in 1622 he painted the portrait of Góngora, capturing his bitterness without any concession.

In 1621 Philip III died in Madrid, and the new monarch, Philip IV, favored a nobleman of a Sevillian family, Gaspar de Guzmán, later Count-Duke of Olivares, who in a short time became the all-powerful favorite of the King. Olivares advocated that the court be made up mostly of Andalusians. Pacheco must have seen this as a great opportunity for his son-in-law, procuring the appropriate contacts so that Velázquez could be presented at court, to which he was to travel on the pretext of seeing the painting collections of El Escorial. His first journey to Madrid took place in the spring of 1622. Velázquez must have been introduced to Olivares by Juan de Fonseca or by Francisco de Rioja, but according to Pacheco's account "it was not possible to portray the king, although it was attempted," so the painter returned to Seville before the end of the year. Whom he did portray, on commission from Pacheco, who was preparing a Libro de retratos (Book of Portraits), was the poet Luis de Góngora, who was chaplain to the King.

Portrait of the Infante Don Carlos (1626-27). Elegant and austere, still with tenebrist lighting, it highlights his face and hands, lit against a background of half-darkness.

Thanks to Fonseca, Velázquez was able to visit the royal painting collections, of enormous quality, where Charles I and Philip II had gathered pictures by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and the Bassanos. According to Julián Gállego, he must then have understood the artistic limitations of Seville and that, besides the imitation of nature, there existed "a poetry in painting and a beauty in tonality." His later study of the royal collection, especially the Titians, had a decisive influence on the painter's stylistic evolution, as he moved from the austere naturalism of his Seville period and its severe earthy palettes to the luminosity of silvery grays and transparent blues in his maturity.

A little later, Pacheco's friends, chiefly Juan de Fonseca, who was a royal chaplain and had been a canon of Seville, managed to get the Count-Duke to summon Velázquez to portray the King. Pacheco related it thus:

In 1623 he was summoned [to Madrid] by the same Don Juan (by order of the Count-Duke); he lodged in his house, where he was treated and served handsomely, and he painted his portrait. That night a son of the Count of Peñaranda, chamberlain of the Cardinal-Infante, took it to the palace, and within an hour everyone in the Palace saw it, the Infantes and the King, which was the highest approval it received. It was ordered that he portray the Infante, but it seemed more fitting to do that of His Majesty first, although this could not be so soon owing to great occupations; in effect it was done on August 30, 1623, to the satisfaction of His Majesty, and of the Infantes and of the Count-Duke, who affirmed that the King had not been portrayed until then; and all the lords who saw it felt the same. He also made, in passing, a sketch of the Prince of Wales, who gave him one hundred escudos.

It used to be assumed that none of these portraits survives, although at present the curator of the Museo del Prado, Javier Portús, believes that the portrait of Philip IV is the one preserved in the Meadows Museum in Dallas; and attempts have been made to identify a disputed Portrait of a Gentleman (Detroit Institute of Arts) with that of Juan de Fonseca. The portrait of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I, is not known; he was an excellent connoisseur of painting and had arrived in Madrid incognito to arrange his marriage with the Infanta Maria, sister of Philip IV, an undertaking that did not prosper. The protocol obligations of this visit must have been what delayed the first portrait of the King, which, given Pacheco's precise dating of August 30, must have been a sketch to be worked up in the workshop. It may have served as the basis for a first, and likewise lost, equestrian portrait, which in 1625 was exhibited in the Calle Mayor "to the admiration of the whole court and the envy of those of the art," to which Pacheco declares himself a witness. Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary of Cardinal Barberini, whom he accompanied on his visit to Madrid in 1626, reports its placement in the New Hall of the Alcázar, forming a pair with Titian's celebrated portrait of Charles V on Horseback at Mühlberg, and testifies to the "grandeur" of the horse and that "è un bel paese" (a beautiful landscape), which according to Pacheco had been painted from life, like everything else.

Everything indicates that the young monarch, six years younger than Velázquez, who had received drawing lessons from Juan Bautista Maíno, was immediately able to appreciate the Sevillian's artistic gifts. As a consequence of that first encounter with the King, in October 1623 Velázquez was ordered to move his residence to Madrid, being appointed painter to the King with a salary of twenty ducats a month, filling the vacancy of Rodrigo de Villandrando, who had died the previous year. This salary, which did not include the remuneration that might be due to him for his paintings, was soon increased by other grants, including an ecclesiastical benefice in the Canary Islands worth 300 ducats a year, granted at the Count-Duke's request by Pope Urban VIII.

The Triumph of Bacchus (1628-29), known as Los borrachos (The Drunkards) and considered the masterpiece of this period. The worshippers on the right are modeled with a dense impasto and in colors that correspond to his youthful stage. However, the luminosity of the nude body and the presence of the landscape in the background show an evolution in his technique.

Velázquez's rapid rise provoked the resentment of the more veteran painters, such as Vicente Carducho and Eugenio Cajés, who accused him of being capable only of painting heads. According to Jusepe Martínez, this led to a competition in 1627 between Velázquez and the other three royal painters: Carducho, Cajés and Angelo Nardi. The winner would be chosen to paint the main canvas of the Great Hall of the Royal Alcázar of Madrid. The subject of the picture was The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. The jury, presided over by Juan Bautista Maíno, declared Velázquez the winner from among the sketches submitted. The picture was hung in that building and was later lost in the fire that destroyed it (Christmas Eve of 1734). This competition contributed to the change in the taste of the court, which abandoned the old style of painting and accepted the new painting.

In March 1627 he was sworn in to the post of usher of the chamber, granted perhaps for his triumph in this competition, with a salary of 350 ducats a year, and from 1628 he held the post of painter of the chamber, vacant on the death of Santiago Morán, considered the most important post among the court painters. His main work consisted of producing portraits of the royal family, so these represent a significant part of his output. Another task was to paint pictures to decorate the royal palaces, which gave him greater freedom in the choice of subjects and in how to represent them, a freedom that ordinary painters, bound to commissions and market demand, did not enjoy. Velázquez could also accept private commissions, and it is recorded that in 1624 he was paid by Doña Antonia de Ipeñarrieta for the portraits he painted for her of her late husband, of the King and of the Count-Duke, but after he moved to Madrid he accepted commissions only from influential members of the court. It is known that he painted several portraits of the King and the Count-Duke, some to be sent outside Spain, such as the two equestrian portraits that in May 1627 were sent to Mantua by the Gonzaga ambassador in Madrid, some of which were lost in the Alcázar fire of 1734.

Among the surviving works of this period, The Triumph of Bacchus stands out especially, popularly known as Los borrachos (The Drunkards), his first mythological composition, for which in July 1629 he received 100 ducats from the King's household. In it, classical antiquity is represented in a vigorous, everyday manner as a gathering of peasants of his time merrily assembled to drink, in which some Sevillian manners still persist. Among the portraits of members of the royal family, The Infante Don Carlos (Museo del Prado) stands out, gallant and somewhat indolent in appearance. Of the portraits not belonging to the royal family, the unfinished Portrait of a Young Man in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich may be singled out. The Geographer in the Museum of Fine Arts of Rouen might also belong to this period; it was inventoried in 1692 in the collection of the Marquis of Carpio as "a portrait one vara in size of a philosopher laughing, with a globe, original by Diego Velázquez." Also identified as Democritus and at one time attributed to Ribera, whose style it closely resembles, it causes a certain perplexity among critics because of the different way in which the hands and head are treated, with very loose brushwork, compared with the tighter manner of the rest of the composition, which would be explained by a reworking of those parts around 1640.

His technique in this period gives more value to light in relation to color and composition. In the portraits of the monarchs, as Palomino indicated, he had to reflect "the discretion and intelligence of the artificer, in knowing how to choose the most pleasing light or contour... for with sovereigns great art is needed to touch on their defects without running the risk of flattery or stumbling into irreverence." These are the norms proper to the "court portrait" to which the painter binds himself in order to give the sitter the appearance that best corresponds to the dignity of his person and his station. But Velázquez limits the number of traditional attributes of power (reduced to the table, the hat, the Golden Fleece or the hilt of the sword) in order to concentrate on the treatment of the face and hands, more brightly lit and progressively subjected to greater refinement. Very characteristic of his work, as occurs in the Portrait of Philip IV in Black (Museo del Prado), is the tendency to repaint, correcting what had been done, which makes the precise dating of his works difficult. These constitute what are called "pentimenti," attributable to the absence of preliminary studies and to a slow way of working, given the painter's phlegmatic character, as the King himself defined it. With the passage of time, what was left underneath and painted over emerges again in an easily perceptible way. In this portrait of the King it can be seen in the legs and the cloak, but X-rays reveal that the portrait was completely repainted around 1628, introducing subtle variations on the underlying portrait, of which there is another copy, possibly autograph, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a few years earlier. The same can be seen in many later portraits, above all of the monarchs.

In 1628 Rubens arrived in Madrid to carry out diplomatic business and remained in the city for almost a year. It is known that he painted some ten portraits of the royal family, most of them lost. When the portraits of Philip IV made by the two painters are compared, the differences are notable: Rubens painted the King in an allegorical manner, while Velázquez represented him as the essence of power. Picasso analyzed it thus: "Velázquez's Philip IV is a different person from Rubens's Philip IV." On this journey Rubens also copied works from the King's painting collection, especially by Titian. He had already copied his works on other occasions, since Titian represented for him one of his main sources of inspiration and stimulus. This work of copying was especially intense at the court of Philip IV, which possessed the most important collection of works by the Venetian. The copies Rubens made were acquired by Philip IV and presumably also inspired Velázquez.

Rubens and Velázquez had already collaborated in a certain way before this journey to Madrid, when the Fleming made use of a portrait of Olivares painted by Velázquez to provide the drawing for an engraving made by Paulus Pontius and printed in Antwerp in 1626, in which the allegorical frame was designed by Rubens and the head by Velázquez. The Sevillian must have watched him paint the royal portraits and the copies of Titian, and it was a great experience for him to observe the execution of those pictures by the two painters who would have the greatest influence on his own work. Pacheco indeed stated that Rubens in Madrid had had little dealing with painters except with his son-in-law, with whom he visited the collections of El Escorial, encouraging him, according to Palomino, to travel to Italy. For Harris there is no doubt that this relationship inspired his first allegorical picture, Los borrachos. However, Calvo Serraller points out that, although most specialists have interpreted Rubens's visit as the first decisive influence on Velázquez's painting, nothing demonstrates a substantial change in his style at this moment. For Calvo Serraller, what is almost certain is that Rubens encouraged the first journey to Italy, since shortly after he left the Spanish court in May 1629 Velázquez obtained permission to make his journey. According to the Italian representatives in Spain, this journey was to complete his studies.

First journey to Italy

The Forge of Vulcan (1630). An essential work for understanding his evolution during his first journey to Italy. The atmosphere has overcome the limitations of tenebrism, and the bodies are modeled in a real space rather than emerging from an enveloping shadow. The concern with the nude and the richness of the expressions suggest the study of Roman-Bolognese classicism.

Thus, after Rubens's departure and surely influenced by him, Velázquez requested leave from the King to travel to Italy to complete his studies. On July 22, 1629, he was granted two years' salary for the journey, 480 ducats, and he also had another 400 ducats from payment for several pictures. Velázquez traveled with a servant and carried letters of recommendation for the authorities of the places he wished to visit.

This journey to Italy represented a decisive change in his painting. Since the previous century many artists from all over Europe had traveled to Italy to get to know the center of European painting admired by all, a longing that Velázquez also shared. Moreover, Velázquez was the painter of the King of Spain, and for that reason all doors were opened to him, allowing him to contemplate works that were within the reach only of the most privileged.

He set out from the port of Barcelona on the ship of Spinola, a Genoese general in the service of the Spanish King, who was returning to his homeland. On August 23, 1629, the ship arrived in Genoa, from where, with hardly a stop, he went on to Venice, where the Spanish ambassador arranged visits for him to the main art collections of the various palaces. According to Palomino, he copied works by Tintoretto. As the political situation in the city was delicate, he stayed there only a short time and left for Ferrara, where he would encounter the painting of Giorgione; the effect that the work of this great innovator had on him is unknown.

He was then in Cento, interested in getting to know the work of Guercino, who painted his pictures with a very white illumination, treated his religious figures as ordinary people and was a great landscape painter. For Julián Gállego, Guercino's work was what most helped Velázquez find his personal style.

In Rome, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whom he had had occasion to portray in Madrid, gave him access to the Vatican rooms, where he spent many days copying the frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael. He then moved to the Villa Medici, on the outskirts of Rome, where he copied its collection of classical sculpture. He did not study only the old masters; at that time the great painters of the Baroque Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Gian Lorenzo Bernini were active in Rome. There is no direct testimony that Velázquez made contact with them, but there are important indications that he knew firsthand the novelties of the Roman art world.

Joseph's Tunic (1630). On this first journey to Italy his knowledge of the Italian masters perfected his technique. This is evident in this picture: in its anatomical modeling, in the play of light, in the harmonious clarity of color and in a more structured and complex composition.

The assimilation of Italian art into Velázquez's style can be seen in The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Tunic, canvases painted at this time on his own initiative, without any commission involved. In The Forge of Vulcan, although elements from the Seville period persist, an important break with his earlier painting can be seen. Some of these changes can be appreciated in the treatment of space: the transition toward the background is gentle, and the interval between figures is very carefully measured. Also in the brushstrokes, previously applied in layers of opaque paint and now over a very light priming, so that the brushstroke is fluid and the touches of light produce surprising effects between the lit areas and the shadows. Thus the contemporary painter Jusepe Martínez concluded: "he came back much improved as regards perspective and architecture."

In Rome he also painted two small landscapes in the garden of the Villa Medici: The Entrance to the Grotto and The Pavilion of Cleopatra-Ariadne, but there is no agreement among historians on when they were executed. Those who maintain that he may have painted them during the first journey, notably López-Rey, rely on the fact that the painter lived in the Villa Medici in the summer of 1630, while most specialists have preferred to move the date of their execution to the second journey, considering their sketch-like technique, almost Impressionist, to be very advanced. The technical studies carried out at the Museo del Prado, although not conclusive in this case, nevertheless support execution around 1630. According to Pantorba, he set out to capture two fleeting "impressions" in the way Monet would do two centuries later. The style of these pictures has frequently been compared to the Roman landscapes that Corot painted in the 19th century. The novelty of these landscapes lies not so much in their subjects as in their execution. Landscape studies taken from nature were an infrequent practice, used only by some Dutch artists established in Rome. Somewhat later, Claude Lorrain also made some well-known drawings in this way. But, unlike all of them, Velázquez was to use oil directly, emulating in his execution the informal technique of drawing.

He remained in Rome until the autumn of 1630 and returned to Madrid by way of Naples, where he painted the portrait of the Queen of Hungary (Museo del Prado). There he was able to meet Jusepe de Ribera, who was at the height of his powers as a painter.

Maturity in Madrid

According to Gudiol, this portrait of Philip IV in Brown and Silver, painted around 1631-1636, is one of the first in which he changed his technique in search of the visual impression. The whole seems to be meticulously rendered, but he achieved the effects of the costume and sleeves through irregular patches and touches.

Having concluded his first journey to Italy, he was in possession of an extraordinary technique. At the age of 32 he began his period of maturity. In Italy he had completed his formative process by studying the masterpieces of the Renaissance, and his pictorial education was the broadest that any Spanish painter had received up to that time.

From the beginning of 1631, back in Madrid, he returned to his main task as painter of royal portraits in a period of abundant production. According to Palomino, immediately after his return to court he presented himself to the Count-Duke, who ordered him to go and thank the King for not having allowed himself to be portrayed by another painter in his absence. He was also expected to portray Prince Balthasar Charles, born during his stay in Rome, whom he portrayed on at least six occasions. He set up his workshop in the Alcázar and had assistants. At the same time, he continued his rise at court, not without disputes: in 1633 he received the staff of Bailiff of the court, assistant of the wardrobe to His Majesty in 1636, assistant of the chamber in 1643, and superintendent of works a year later. The documentation, relatively abundant for this stage and collected by Pita Andrade, nevertheless presents important gaps regarding his artistic work.

In 1631 a young assistant of twenty entered his workshop: Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, born in Cuenca, about whose early training as a painter nothing is known. Mazo married Velázquez's elder daughter, Francisca, who was 15 years old, on August 21, 1633. In 1634 his father-in-law ceded to him his post of usher of the chamber, to secure Francisca's financial future. From then on Mazo appeared closely linked to Velázquez as his most important assistant, but his own works would not go beyond being copies or adaptations of the Sevillian master, standing out, according to the Aragonese Jusepe Martínez, for his skill in painting small figures. His dexterity in copying his master's works, highlighted by Palomino, and his intervention in some of Velázquez's works that had been left unfinished at his death have given rise to certain uncertainties, since there are still disputes among critics over the attribution of certain pictures to Velázquez or to Mazo.

In 1632 he painted a Portrait of Prince Balthasar Charles that is preserved in the Wallace Collection in London, derived from an earlier portrait, Prince Balthasar Charles with a Dwarf, finished in 1631. For José Gudiol, this second portrait represents the beginning of a new stage in Velázquez's technique, which in a long evolution led him to his last paintings, wrongly called "Impressionist." In some areas of this picture, especially in the costume, Velázquez stops modeling the form as it is, in order to paint according to the visual impression. In this way he sought the simplification of pictorial work, but this required a profound knowledge of how the effects of light are produced on the things represented in the painting. It also requires great assurance, great technique and considerable instinct to be able to choose the dominant and principal elements, those that would allow the viewer to appreciate all the details exactly, as if they had truly been painted in detail. It also requires total command of chiaroscuro to give the sensation of volume. This technique was consolidated in the portrait Philip IV in Brown and Silver, where, by means of an irregular arrangement of light touches, the embroidery of the Monarch's costume is suggested.

He took part in the two great decorative projects of the period: the new Buen Retiro Palace, promoted by Olivares, and the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting lodge near Madrid.

For the Buen Retiro Palace, Velázquez produced between 1634 and 1635 a series of five equestrian portraits of Philip III, Philip IV, the wives of both, and the heir to the throne. These decorated the end walls of the great Hall of Realms, conceived with the purpose of exalting the Spanish monarchy and its sovereign. For its side walls a large series of canvases was also commissioned with battles showing the recent victories of the Spanish troops. Velázquez painted one of them, The Surrender of Breda, also called Las lanzas (The Lances). Both the portrait of Philip IV on Horseback and that of the prince are among the painter's masterpieces. Perhaps he may have received help from his workshop on the other three equestrian portraits, but in any case details of great skill belonging to Velázquez's hand can be observed in them. The arrangement of the equestrian portraits of King Philip IV, the Queen and Prince Balthasar Charles in the Hall of Realms has been reconstructed by Brown on the basis of descriptions from the period. The portrait of the prince, the future of the monarchy, was placed between those of his parents:

Philip IV on Horseback (1634)

Prince Balthasar Charles on Horseback (1635)

Queen Elisabeth of France on Horseback (1628-1636)

For the Torre de la Parada he painted three portraits, of the King, of his brother, the Cardinal-Infante Don Ferdinand, and of the Prince, dressed as hunters. Also for that hunting lodge he painted three other pictures, Aesop, Menippus and Mars Resting.

Around 1634, and also destined for the Buen Retiro Palace, Velázquez would have produced a group of portraits of jesters and "men of pleasure" of the court. The inventory of 1701 mentions six vertical full-length pictures that might have served to decorate a staircase or a room adjoining the Queen's quarters. Of these, only three are preserved in the Museo del Prado: Pablo de Valladolid, The Buffoon Called Don Juan of Austria and The Buffoon Cristóbal de Castañeda as Barbarossa. The lost Francisco de Ocáriz y Ochoa, who entered the King's service at the same time as Cristóbal de Pernía, might belong to the same series, as might the so-called Juan Calabazas (Calabacillas with a Pinwheel) in the Cleveland Museum of Art, whose authorship and date of execution are doubtful. Two other canvases with seated jesters decorated the overdoors of the Queen's room in the Torre de la Parada, described in the inventories as two dwarfs, one of them "in the dress of a philosopher" and in an attitude of study, identified with Diego de Acedo, el Primo, and the other a seated jester with a deck of cards who can be recognized in Francisco Lezcano, the Child of Vallecas. The Buffoon Calabacillas Seated could have the same provenance. Two other portraits of jesters were inventoried in 1666 by Juan Martínez del Mazo in the Alcázar: El Primo, which must have been lost in the fire of 1734, and The Buffoon Don Sebastián de Morra, painted around 1644. Much has been written about these series of jesters, in which he compassionately portrayed their physical and mental deficiencies. Set in implausible spaces, they allowed him to carry out stylistic experiments with absolute freedom.

The Buffoon Calabacillas (1637-39). One of Velázquez's most harrowing portraits. The jester is represented realistically with his epileptic's hands, the strabismus evident in his gaze, and his smile produced by a deformed and asymmetrical grimace.

Among his religious pictures of this period, Saint Anthony and Saint Paul the Hermit, painted for its hermitage in the gardens of the Buen Retiro Palace, and the Christ Crucified, painted for the convent of San Plácido, stand out. According to Azcárate, in this Christ he reflected his religiosity, expressed in an idealized and serene body of calm and beautiful forms.

The 1630s were Velázquez's most active decade with the brush; almost a third of his catalog belongs to this period. Around 1640 this intense production decreased drastically and never recovered thereafter. The reason for such a decline in activity is not known with certainty, although it seems likely that he was absorbed by courtly duties in the service of the King, which helped him gain a better social position but took away time for painting. As superintendent of works, he also had to attend to conservation tasks and direct the renovations being made in the Royal Alcázar. Between 1642 and 1646 he also had to accompany the court on the "journeys to Aragon." There he painted a new portrait of the King "in the manner in which he entered Lérida" to commemorate the lifting of the siege laid to the city by the French army; it was immediately sent to Madrid and exhibited in public at the request of the Catalans at court. It is the so-called Philip IV at Fraga, named after the town in Huesca where it was painted, in which Velázquez achieved a notable balance between the meticulousness of the head and the sparkling highlights of the attire.

In 1643 Velázquez took up the post of assistant of the chamber, which represented the highest recognition of royal favor, since he was one of the persons closest to the Monarch. After this appointment a series of personal misfortunes followed, the death of his father-in-law and master Francisco Pacheco on November 27, 1644, added to those that occurred at court: the rebellions of Catalonia and Portugal in 1640; the fall from power of the man who had been his protector, the King's favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, together with the defeat of the Spanish tercios at the Battle of Rocroi in 1643; the death of Queen Elisabeth in 1644; and finally the death, in 1646, of the heir to the throne, Prince Balthasar Charles, at the age of 17; these would make these difficult years for Velázquez as well.

Second journey to Italy

Velázquez arrived in Málaga at the beginning of December 1648, from where he would embark with a small fleet on January 21, 1649, bound for Genoa, remaining in Italy until mid-1651, with the aim of acquiring ancient paintings and sculptures for the King. He was also to engage Pietro da Cortona to paint in fresco several ceilings of rooms that had been renovated in the Royal Alcázar of Madrid. Unable to buy ancient sculptures, he had to settle for commissioning bronze copies by means of casts or molds taken from famous originals. Nor could he persuade Pietro da Cortona to execute the frescoes of the Alcázar, and in his place he engaged Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli, experts in trompe-l'œil painting. This work of management, rather than creative work proper, absorbed much of his time; he traveled seeking paintings by old masters, selecting ancient sculptures to copy and obtaining permits to do so. Once again he made a tour of the main Italian states in two stages: the first took him to Venice, where he acquired works by Veronese and Tintoretto for the Spanish Monarch; the second, after settling in Rome, to Naples, where he met Ribera again and obtained funds before returning to the Eternal City.

Portrait of Juan de Pareja (1649-50). This portrait of his Morisco slave was exhibited in the portico of the Pantheon on Saint Joseph's Day. In greenish tones, he represented him with an elegant and self-assured bearing.

In Rome, at the beginning of 1650, he was elected a member of the two main organizations of artists: the Academy of Saint Luke in January, and the Congregazione dei Virtuosi of the Pantheon on February 13. Membership in the Congregation of the Virtuosi gave him the right to exhibit in the portico of the Pantheon on March 19, Saint Joseph's Day, where he exhibited his portrait of Juan Pareja (Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).

The portrait of Pareja was painted before the one made of Pope Innocent X. Victor Stoichita considers that Palomino related this in the way that best suited him, altering the chronology and accentuating the myth:

When it was determined that he should portray the Supreme Pontiff, he wished to prepare himself beforehand with the exercise of painting a head from life; he did that of Juan Pareja, his slave and a sharp painter, so like and with such liveliness that, having sent it with Pareja himself to the judgment of some friends, they stood looking at the painted portrait and at the original with admiration and astonishment, not knowing which of them they were to speak to, or which was to answer (...) Andrés Esmit related ... that, it being customary on Saint Joseph's Day to adorn the cloister of the Rotunda [the Pantheon of Agrippa] (where Raphael of Urbino is buried) with distinguished ancient and modern paintings, this portrait was placed in that site with such universal applause that, in the vote of all the painters of different nations, everything else seemed painting, but this alone truth; in consideration of which Velázquez was received as a Roman Academician, in the year 1650.

Stoichita highlights the legend forged over the years around this portrait, on the basis of this text, on several levels: the contrast between the portrait-rehearsal of the slave and the final portrait with the grandeur of the pope; the images exhibited in an almost sacred space (at the tomb of Raphael, Prince of painters); the universal applause of all the painters of different nations on contemplating it among distinguished ancient and modern paintings. In reality, it is known that some months passed between one portrait and the other, since Velázquez did not portray the Pope until August of that year, and, moreover, his admission as an academician had taken place before the exhibition.

About Juan de Pareja, Velázquez's slave and assistant, it is known that he was a Morisco, "of mixed race and of strange color" according to Palomino. It is not known at what moment he came into contact with the master, but in 1642 he already signed as a witness to a power of attorney granted by Velázquez. He was a witness again in 1647 and once more in 1653, signing on this occasion the power of attorney to make a will of Francisca Velázquez, the painter's daughter. According to Palomino, Pareja helped Velázquez with mechanical tasks, such as grinding colors and preparing canvases. He also asserts that the master, by reason of the "dignity of the art," never allowed him to deal with matters of painting or drawing, and that Pareja learned to paint in secret from his owner. This is demonstrably false, since in reality, although it is true that Pareja entered the service of Diego Velázquez around 1630 as a slave and assistant, Sevillian and Roman documents indicate that he already possessed painting skills before his manumission, and that his training developed in an observational and practical way under the implicit or explicit tutelage of the master during the journeys to Italy (1649-1651). Records of the parish of San Pedro in Seville mention him as a free "painter" on dates prior to 1630, which suggests a prior status or training, possibly acquired in Antequera or Málaga before joining Velázquez's workshop. Velázquez, far from hindering his development, took him with him to Rome, where Pareja produced independent works, such as his self-portrait exhibited in the Pantheon (1650), which earned him admission to the Academy of Saint Luke—an achievement that implies an already consolidated professional level.

In 1649 he accompanied Velázquez on his second journey to Italy, where the painter portrayed him and, as is known from a published document, on November 23, 1650, still in Rome, granted him his letter of freedom, with the obligation to continue serving the painter for four more years.

Detail of the portrait of Pope Innocent X

The most important portrait he painted in Rome was that of Pope Innocent X. Gombrich considers that Velázquez must have felt the great challenge of having to paint the pope, and that on contemplating the portraits that Titian and Raphael had made of earlier popes, considered masterpieces, he would have been aware that he would be remembered and compared with these masters.

Velázquez, in the same way, made a great portrait, interpreting with assurance the expression of the pope and the quality of his garments.

It is said that when the Pope saw his finished portrait, he exclaimed, somewhat disconcerted: Troppo vero! ("too truthful"), although he could not deny its quality. The pontiff presented Velázquez with a medal and a gold chain, which would be among the painter's possessions when he died.

The excellent work on the Pope's portrait led other members of the papal curia to want portraits of themselves by Velázquez's hand.

The painter Joshua Reynolds praised it as "the finest portrait in all of Rome" (praise that would be echoed a century later by Oscar Wilde), and a critic commented that "next to it hangs a Virgin by Guido Reni which by comparison looks like parchment." The historian Hippolyte Taine considered this portrait "the masterpiece of all portraits" and said that "once seen, it is impossible to forget."

Palomino says that he made seven portraits of persons whom he names, two unidentified ones, and others that were left unfinished, a rather surprising volume of activity for Velázquez, a painter who worked very sparingly.

Many critics assign the Venus at the Mirror to this Italian stage. Velázquez must have produced at least two other female nudes, probably two other Venuses, one of them mentioned in the inventory of the possessions he left at his death.

Venus at the Mirror (1650). The reduced color range of the picture, limited to a bright red, a warm brown, a soft blue and a white, makes the body of Venus stand out, dominating everything else; it is in fact painted with a mixture of those four colors. Venus appears in a pose at once sensual and modest.

The subject of the toilet of Venus had been treated previously by two of the masters who had the greatest influence on Velázquez's painting, Titian and Rubens, but because of its erotic implications it aroused serious misgivings in Spain. It should be remembered that Pacheco advised painters who were obliged to paint a female nude to use honest women as models for the head and hands, imitating the rest from statues or engravings. Velázquez's Venus brings a new variant to the genre: the goddess lies with her back turned and shows her face to the viewer reflected in the mirror.

Jennifer Montagu discovered a notarial document attesting to the existence in 1652 of a Roman son of Velázquez, Antonio de Silva, a natural son whose mother is unknown. Scholars have speculated about this, and Camón Aznar suggested that she might have been the model who posed for the nude of the Venus at the Mirror, who was perhaps the woman Palomino called Flaminia Triunfi, "an excellent painter," whom Velázquez is said to have portrayed. Of this supposed painter, however, there is no other information, although Marini suggests that she might perhaps be identified with Flaminia Triva, aged twenty, sister and collaborator of Antonio Domenico Triva, a disciple of Guercino.

The surviving correspondence shows Velázquez's continual delays in postponing the end of the journey. Philip IV was impatient and wanted him back. In February 1650 he wrote to his ambassador in Rome to urge his return: "since you know his phlegm, and let it be by sea and not by land, because he could keep lingering, all the more given his nature." Velázquez was still in Rome at the end of November. The Count of Oñate reported his departure on December 2, and in the middle of the month his passage through Modena was reported. However, he did not embark at Genoa until May 1651.

Last decade: his pictorial peak

In June 1651 he returned to Madrid with numerous works of art. Shortly afterward, Philip IV appointed him Aposentador Real (Royal Quartermaster), which raised him high at court and added substantial income to what he already received as painter, assistant of the chamber, superintendent and by way of pension. Apart from this he received the stipulated amounts for the pictures he made. His administrative posts absorbed him more and more, including that of Royal Quartermaster, and took away a great deal of time from his pictorial work. Even so, some of his finest portraits and his masterworks Las Meninas and The Spinners belong to this period.

The arrival of the new queen, Mariana of Austria, prompted the execution of several portraits. The marriageable Infanta Maria Theresa was also portrayed on several occasions, since her image had to be sent to prospective husbands at the European courts. The new royal children born to Mariana also gave rise to several portraits, above all Margaret, born in 1651.

At the end of his life he painted his two largest and most complex compositions, The Fable of Arachne (1658), popularly known as Las hilanderas (The Spinners), and the most celebrated and famous of all his pictures, The Family of Philip IV or Las Meninas (1656). In them we see his final style, in which he seems to represent the scene through a fleeting vision. He used bold brushstrokes that up close seem disconnected but, viewed from a distance, acquire their full meaning, anticipating the painting of Manet and the 19th-century Impressionists, on whom his style had such influence. The interpretations of these two works have given rise to a multitude of studies, and they are considered two masterpieces of European painting.

The last two official portraits he painted of the King are very different from the earlier ones. Both the bust in the Museo del Prado and the debated one in the National Gallery are two intimate portraits in which he appears dressed in black, and only in the second with the Golden Fleece. According to Harris, they reflect the physical and moral decline of the monarch, of which he was aware. Velázquez had not portrayed him for nine years, and Philip IV himself expressed his reluctance to sit for him thus: "I am not inclined to go through Velázquez's phlegm, nor to see myself growing old."

The last commission he received from King Philip IV was the execution in 1659 of four mythological scenes for the Hall of Mirrors of the Royal Alcázar of Madrid, where they were placed alongside works by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Rubens, the monarch's favorite painters. Of the four paintings (Apollo and Marsyas, Adonis and Venus, Psyche and Cupid, and Mercury and Argus), only the last survives today, located in the Museo del Prado; the other three were destroyed in the fire of the Royal Alcázar on Christmas Eve of 1734, already in the time of Philip V. During that fire more than five hundred works by masters of painting were lost and the building was reduced to rubble, until four years later construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid began on its site. The quality of the surviving canvas, and the rarity among Spanish painters of the period of the subjects treated in these scenes, which by their nature would have included nudes, make the loss of these three paintings especially grievous.

Portraits of the royal children

The Infanta Margaret in Blue (1659)

Prince Philip Prosper (1659)

The Infanta Maria Theresa (1652)

His final style. Alla prima painting, rapid and spontaneous, with juxtaposition and superimposition of brushstrokes that from a distance achieve the required visual effects. All are preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

In keeping with the mentality of his time, Velázquez wished to attain nobility, and he sought to enter the Order of Santiago, counting for this on royal favor, which on June 12, 1658, granted him the habit of a knight. To be admitted, however, the candidate had to prove that his direct ancestors had also belonged to the nobility, and that there were no Jews or converts among them. For this reason, the Council of Military Orders opened an investigation into his lineage in July, taking statements from 148 witnesses. Very significantly, many of them stated that Velázquez did not live from painting but from his work at court, and some of those closest to him, also painters, went so far as to say that he had never sold a picture. At the beginning of April 1659 the Council concluded the gathering of reports, rejecting the painter's claim because the nobility of his paternal grandmother and of his maternal grandparents had not been proven. In these circumstances only a papal dispensation could secure Velázquez's admission to the Order. At the King's request, Pope Alexander VII issued an apostolic brief on July 9, 1659, ratified on October 1, granting him the requested dispensation, and the King conferred hidalgo status on him on November 28, thus overcoming the resistance of the Council of Orders, which on the same date dispatched the coveted title in Velázquez's favor.

In 1660 the King and the court accompanied the Infanta Maria Theresa to Fuenterrabía, near the French border, where she met her new husband Louis XIV. Velázquez, as Royal Quartermaster, was in charge of preparing the lodging of the retinue and of decorating the pavilion where the meeting took place. The work must have been exhausting, and on his return he fell ill with smallpox.

He fell ill at the end of July and, a few days later, on August 6, 1660, he died at three in the afternoon in Madrid. The following day, August 7, he was buried in the now-vanished Church of San Juan Bautista, with the honors due to his offices and as a knight of the Order of Santiago. Eight days later, on August 14, his wife Juana also died.

Contemporary documentation on the painter

Self-Portrait, Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia

His first biographers provided abundant basic information on his life and work. The first was Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), a person very close to him, since he was his master in his youth and also his father-in-law. In a treatise devoted to the Arte de la pintura (Art of Painting), finished in 1638, he gave ample information up to that date. He provided personal details about his apprenticeship, his first years at court and his first journey to Italy. The Aragonese Jusepe Martínez, who knew him in Madrid and Zaragoza, included a brief biographical sketch in his Discursos practicables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura (1673), with information on the second journey to Italy and on the honors received at court. There is also the complete biography of the painter written by Antonio Palomino (1655-1721), published in 1724, 64 years after Velázquez's death. This work, relatively late, was nevertheless based on the biographical notes taken by a friend of the painter, Lázaro Díaz del Valle, which have survived in manuscript, and on the lost notes of one of his last disciples, Juan de Alfaro (1643-1680). In addition, Palomino was a painter at court, knew Velázquez's works in the royal collections well and spoke with people who had known the painter in their youth. He gave abundant information about his second journey to Italy and about his activity as painter of the chamber and as an official of the Palace.

Various poetic tributes, among them some very early ones such as the sonnet dedicated by Juan Vélez de Guevara to an equestrian portrait of the King, the panegyric by Salcedo Coronel to another of the Count-Duke, or the epigram by Gabriel Bocángel on the Portrait of a Lady of Superior Beauty, together with information on specific works, allow us to confirm the painter's rapid recognition in circles close to the court. Other information is found in contemporary writers such as Diego Saavedra Fajardo or Baltasar Gracián, in whom his fame, although directly linked to his condition as the King's portraitist, transcends the merely courtly sphere. Very significant in this respect are the comments of Father Francisco de los Santos, with information on his participation in the decoration of the Monastery of El Escorial. There are also many administrative documents about events that happened to him. However, nothing is known of his letters, personal writings, friendships or private life, which would allow us to inquire into his life, his work and his thought. This makes it difficult to understand the artist's personality.

His interests in books, however, are known. His library, very large for the time, consisted of 154 volumes on mathematics, geometry, geography, mechanics, anatomy, architecture and art theory. Recently, several scholars have attempted through these books to approach an understanding of his personality.

The artist

Prince Balthasar Charles on Horseback (detail, 1635). Considered one of his masterpieces. His rapid, sketch-like and enormously precise brushstrokes anticipate Impressionist techniques by two centuries.

Evolution of his pictorial style

In his early Seville years, his style was that of tenebrist naturalism, making use of an intense, directed light. His densely impasted brushwork modeled forms with precision, and his dominant colors were toasted tones and coppery flesh tints.

According to Xavier de Salas, after Velázquez settled in Madrid he studied the great Venetian painters in the royal collection, modified his palette, and began to paint with grays and blacks instead of earthy colors. Until the end of his first Madrid period, specifically until he produced Los borrachos, he still painted his figures with precise outlines and set them off from the backgrounds with opaque brushstrokes.

On his first journey to Italy he radically transformed his style. During this journey the painter tried out new techniques in search of luminosity. Velázquez had been developing his technique over the preceding years, and he completed this transformation in the mid-1630s. At that point he is considered to have found his own pictorial language: a combination of loose brushstrokes of transparent color and precise touches of pigment to bring out the details.

Beginning with The Forge of Vulcan, painted in Italy, the preparation of his canvases changed, and it remained that way for the rest of his life. It consisted basically of lead white applied with a palette knife, which formed a highly luminous ground, complemented with increasingly transparent brushstrokes. He completed this change in The Surrender of Breda and the Equestrian Portrait of Balthasar Charles, both painted in the 1630s. Light grounds and transparent layers of color were frequently used by Flemish and Italian painters to create great luminosity, but Velázquez developed this technique to extremes never seen before.

This evolution came about through his knowledge of the work of other artists, especially the royal collection and the paintings he studied in Italy. It also came from his direct relationship with other painters, such as Rubens during his visit to Madrid and those he met on his first journey to Italy. Velázquez, therefore, did not work like the other painters active in Spain, who painted by superimposing layers of color. He developed his own style of diluted brushstrokes with quick, precise touches in the details. These small details were very important in the composition. His painting continued to evolve toward greater simplification and speed of execution. Over time, his technique became more precise and schematic. It was the result of a long process of inner maturation.

The painter did not have the composition fully defined when he set to work. He preferred to adjust it as the painting progressed, introducing modifications that improved the result. He rarely made preparatory drawings and simply sketched the general lines of the composition. In many of his works his celebrated corrections can be seen with the naked eye. The outlines of the figures overlap on the canvas as he changed their position or added or removed elements. Many of these adjustments are visible with the naked eye: changes in the position of the hands, the sleeves, the collars and the garments. Another of his habits was to retouch his works after they were finished, and in some cases these retouchings were made long afterward.

The palette of colors he used was very limited, and he employed the same pigments throughout his life. What changed over time was the way he mixed and applied them.

The degree of finish is another fundamental part of his art, and it depends on the subject. The figures, particularly heads and hands, are always the most elaborated part. In the portraits of the royal family they are far more worked than in those of the jesters, where he took the greatest technical liberties. In paintings such as The Needlewoman, the area sketched with broad brushstrokes occupies a large part of the canvas. These sketched areas appear throughout his life in many portraits and in other mythological, religious or historical compositions. For López-Rey it is clear that these sketched parts have an intrinsic expressive intensity, are well integrated into the composition of the painting, and can be considered part of Velázquez's art.

Detail of Las Meninas showing his late style: long, loose strokes in the outlines and short brushstrokes for the touches of light, mainly in the dresses.

His drawings

Very few drawings by Velázquez are known, which makes them difficult to study. Pacheco and Palomino, his first biographers, speak of his work as a draftsman. Even so, his alla prima painting technique seems to rule out the execution of numerous preliminary studies. Pacheco refers to the drawings Velázquez made during his apprenticeship of a boy who served him as a model. He also relates that during his first journey to Italy Velázquez was lodged in the Vatican, where he was able to draw the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo freely. He may have used some of those drawings many years later in The Fable of Arachne. There, for the two principal spinners, he used the design of the ephebes placed above the Persian Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Palomino, for his part, relates that he made drawn studies of the works of the Venetian painters of the Renaissance, "and particularly of Tintoretto's painting of the Crucifixion of Christ Our Lord, abundant in figures". None of these works has survived.

Preparatory drawing and finished painting

Preparatory drawing (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando).

Workshop copy of the lost painting of Cardinal Borja (1645), Museo de Arte de Ponce. Other replicas of it are known.

According to Gudiol, the only drawing that can be attributed to his hand with complete certainty is the study made for the portrait of Cardinal Borja. Velázquez drew it in pencil at the age of 45. Gudiol says of it that "it is executed with simplicity but giving the precise value to lines, shadows, surfaces and volumes within the realist tendency".

For the rest of the drawings attributed to or related to Velázquez, historians do not agree, because of the diversity of techniques employed. Besides the portrait of Cardinal Borja, Gudiol accepts with full conviction only a head of a girl and a female bust. Both portray the same girl, both were executed in black chalk on linen paper, and they are undoubtedly by the same hand. Both drawings are kept in the National Library in Madrid and probably belong to his Seville period. López-Rey and Jonathan Brown accept as autograph two very light pencil sketches, studies for figures in The Surrender of Breda, which are also kept in the National Library in Madrid. More recently, McKim-Smith has accepted as authentic eight drawings of the Pope sketched on two sheets of paper kept in Toronto, which she considers preparatory studies for the portrait of Innocent X.

This scarcity of drawings supports the assumption that Velázquez began his paintings without preliminary studies, marking the initial lines of the composition on the canvas. This is corroborated by some areas he left unfinished in several paintings, where vigorous strokes appear. Examples are the left hand in the portrait of a man in the Munich Pinakothek and the head of Philip IV in the portrait of Montañés. The same has been verified in other paintings by the artist kept in the Museo del Prado, where infrared reflectography sometimes reveals the strokes of these essential lines of the composition.

Recognition of his painting

Recognition of Velázquez as a great master of Western painting came relatively late. Until the early 19th century his name rarely appears outside Spain among the artists considered major. There are several reasons for this. He devoted most of his career to the service of Philip IV, so almost all his output remained in the royal palaces, which were not very accessible to the public. Unlike Murillo or Zurbarán, he did not depend on ecclesiastical clients and produced few works for churches and other religious buildings, so he was not a popular artist.

Pablo de Valladolid (1636-37). With neither floor nor background, he creates the space by means of the shadow, heightened by the diagonal receding into depth. This portrait was among those most admired by Manet, who said: "... the background disappears. It is air that surrounds the little man..."

In addition, he shared in the general incomprehension shown toward some painters of the late Renaissance and the Baroque, such as El Greco, Caravaggio or Rembrandt. These painters had to wait three centuries to be understood by critics, who instead exalted other painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck and, in general, those who persisted in the old style. Velázquez's poor fortune with the critics must have begun early. The court painters criticized him for knowing how to paint only "a head". Palomino also relates that the first equestrian portrait of Philip IV submitted to public judgment was heavily criticized on the grounds that the horse went against the rules of art, and that the angry painter erased a large part of the painting. Elsewhere, however, he spoke of the excellent reception the public gave that same portrait, and quoted the laudatory verses of Juan Vélez de Guevara. Pacheco, in his own day, already warned of the need to defend this kind of painting against the accusation that it was mere blots. Even today any enthusiast is amazed to see, close up, a tangle of colors that takes on its full meaning from a distance. In that era such optical effects were still more disconcerting and impressive. Velázquez adopted them shortly after his first journey to Italy, and as a supporter of the new style he was a constant subject of debate.

Europe first learned of the painter through Antonio Palomino, a devoted admirer. His biography of Velázquez was published in 1724 in volume III of El museo pictórico y escala óptica. It was translated in abridged form into English in London in 1739, into French in Paris in 1749 and 1762, and into German in Dresden in 1781, and from then on it served historians as a source of knowledge. In the Lettere d'un vago italiano ad un suo amico (1764), Norberto Caimo used Palomino's text to extol the "Principe de'Pittori Spagnuoli", who had masterfully joined Roman drawing to Venetian color. The first French judgment of Velázquez is earlier and is found in volume V (1688) of André Félibien's Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes. Félibien's knowledge of Spanish painting was limited to what was kept in the French royal collections. He could therefore cite only a landscape by Cleantes (that is, Collantes) and "plusieurs Portraits de la Maison d'Autriche", kept in the lower rooms of the Louvre and attributed to Velázquez. His interlocutor had asked him what he found admirable in the work of these two unknown painters. In reply, Félibien placed them among the painters of the second rank, but praised them because "they have chosen and observed nature in a very particular way", without the beautiful air of the Italian painters. In the 18th century Pierre-Jean Mariette described Velázquez's paintings as "inconceivable audacities which, at a distance, make a surprising effect and succeed in producing a total illusion".

Also in the 18th century, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs considered that Velázquez lacked notions of ideal beauty because of his tendency toward naturalism. Even so, Mengs held that he had succeeded in making the air circulate around the things he painted, and for that reason deserved respect. In his letters to Antonio Ponz, Mengs praised certain specific paintings for their skillful imitation of nature. He singled out The Spinners, from Velázquez's late style, "in whose execution the hand seems to have had no part". Accounts by English travelers also contributed to a better knowledge and appreciation of his painting. These included Richard Twiss (1775), Henry Swinburne (1779) and Joseph Townsend (1786). Townsend offered the customary praise of the imitation of nature, in which the Spaniards are not inferior to the leading masters of Italy or Flanders. He also valued the treatment of light and aerial perspective, in which Velázquez "leaves all other painters quite far behind him".

With the Enlightenment and its educational ideals, Goya was commissioned to make engravings of some of the works by Velázquez kept in the royal collections. Goya once declared that he had no other masters than Velázquez, Rembrandt and Nature. Diderot and D'Alembert, in the article "peinture" of the L'Encyclopédie of 1791, described the life of Velázquez and some of his masterpieces: The Waterseller, Los borrachos and The Spinners. Shortly afterward, Ceán Bermúdez renewed Palomino's assessment in his Diccionario (1800), expanding it with some works from Velázquez's Seville period. Many of these had already left Spain. The painter Francisco Preciado de la Vega wrote to Giambatista Ponfredi in a letter dated 1765 about the "bambochadas" Velázquez had painted there "in a quite colorful and finished manner, after the taste of Caravaggio", which had been carried off by foreigners. Velázquez's work began to be better known outside Spain when foreign travelers visiting the country were able to see it in the Museo del Prado, which began to display the royal collections in 1819. Before that, only those with special permission could see his work in the royal palaces.

Stirling-Maxwell's study of the painter, published in London in 1855 and translated into French in 1865, helped in the rediscovery of the artist. It was the first modern study of the painter's life and work. The reassessment of Velázquez's importance as a painter coincided with a change in artistic sensibility.

The Fifer, Édouard Manet
1866 (160 x 98 cm)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The definitive reappraisal of the master was carried out by the Impressionist painters, who fully understood his lessons. Chief among them were Manet and Renoir, who traveled to the Prado to discover and understand him. When Manet made his famous study trip to Madrid in 1865, the painter's fame was already established. Yet no one was as amazed as Manet, and no one did more to promote the understanding and appreciation of his art. He called him the "painter of painters" and "the greatest painter who has ever existed". The influence of Velázquez can be seen, for example, in The Fifer, in which Manet openly drew inspiration from the Sevillian painter's portraits of dwarfs and jesters. The confusion surrounding his work must also be taken into account. At that time there was considerable chaos and great ignorance regarding his autograph works, copies, workshop replicas and erroneous attributions, and the difference between them was not clear. Between 1821 and 1850 some 147 works attributed to Velázquez were sold in Paris. Of these, specialists today recognize only one, The Lady with a Fan, now in London, as authentic.

Velázquez thus emerged as a universal painter around 1850. In the second half of the century he was considered the supreme realist and the father of modern art. Toward the end of the century, the interpretation of Velázquez as a proto-Impressionist painter was added. In 1899 Stevenson studied his paintings with a painter's eye and found numerous connections between Velázquez's technique and that of the French Impressionists. José Ortega y Gasset placed the height of Velázquez's fame between 1880 and 1920, coinciding with the time of the French Impressionists.

Then the reverse happened. Around 1920 Impressionism and its aesthetic ideas declined, and with them the esteem for Velázquez. According to Ortega, there began a period that he called the invisibility of Velázquez.

Influences and tributes in 20th-century art

The essential chapter that Velázquez constitutes in the history of art can be seen today in the way 20th-century painters have judged his work. Pablo Picasso paid his compatriot the most visible tribute, with the series of canvases he devoted to Las Meninas (1957). He reinterpreted the painting in a Cubist style while precisely preserving the original position of the figures. Another famous series is the one Francis Bacon devoted in 1953 to the Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Salvador Dalí showed his admiration for the painter in several ways. In 1958 he produced a work entitled Velázquez Painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory. In the year of the tercentenary of Velázquez's death he followed it with a Portrait of Juan de Pareja Repairing a String of His Mandolin and his own version of Las Meninas (1960). Dalí also evoked Las Meninas in The Apotheosis of the Dollar (1965), in which he vindicated himself.

The influence of Velázquez has also reached the cinema. It is particularly notable in the case of Jean-Luc Godard. In Pierrot le fou (1965), he staged a girl reading a text about Velázquez by Élie Faure, taken from his L'Histoire de l'Art:

Vélasquez, après cinquante ans, ne peignait plus jamais une chose définie. Il errait autour des objets avec l'air et le crépuscule. Il surprenait dans l'ombre et la transparence des fonds les palpitations colorées dont il faisait le centre invisible de sa symphonie silencieuse.

Catalog and museography

The Jester Don Sebastián de Morra (1645). Note the luminosity of the face, the concentrated gaze, the depiction of the clothing and the treatment of the neutral background.

The painter's surviving works are estimated at between one hundred twenty and one hundred twenty-five canvases. This is a small number considering his forty years of devotion to painting. If the works known from references but now lost are added, he must have painted around one hundred sixty pictures. In his first twenty years of activity he painted about one hundred twenty, at a rate of six a year. In his last twenty years he painted only about forty, at a rate of two a year. Palomino explained that this decline occurred because his many duties at court took up much of his time.

William Stirling-Maxwell produced the first catalog of Velázquez's work in 1848, and it included 226 paintings. Successive catalogs by other authors have gradually reduced the number of authentic works to the current figure of 120-125. Of the current catalogs, the most widely used is that of José López-Rey, published in 1963 and revised in 1979. The first edition included one hundred twenty works, and the revision one hundred twenty-three.

The Museo del Prado holds about fifty works by the painter, the core of the royal collection. Another ten works are found in other places and museums in Madrid.

Ten paintings can be admired in Vienna's Museum of Art History (Kunsthistorisches Museum), among them five portraits from his last decade. Most of these paintings are portraits of the Infanta Margarita. They were sent to the imperial court in Vienna so that her cousin, Emperor Leopold, who had been betrothed to her at her birth, could follow her growth.

Some twenty paintings are kept in the British Isles, where there were collectors of his painting even during Velázquez's lifetime. This is where the largest number of works from the Seville period is found, and where the only surviving Venus by Velázquez is kept. The bodegones are in public galleries in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. Most of these works left Spain during the Napoleonic Invasion.

Another twenty or so works are in the United States, half of them in museums in New York.

Work

Part of his finest work is included below to give a view of the mature pictorial style for which he is recognized worldwide. First comes The Surrender of Breda of 1635, in which he experimented with luminosity. Next is the portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in 1650, one of the best portraits by an artist who specialized in the genre. Finally come his two masterly late works, Las Meninas of 1656 and The Spinners of 1658.

The Surrender of Breda

Main article: The Surrender of Breda

The Surrender of Breda (1635). 307 x 367 cm. In this work he found a new way of capturing light. Velázquez no longer uses the "Caravaggesque" manner of illuminating volumes with intense, directed light, as he had done in his Seville period. The technique has become very fluid. As he went along, he modified the composition several times, erasing what he did not like with light superimpositions of color. The lances of the Spanish soldiers, for example, were added at a later stage.

This painting of the battle of Breda was intended to decorate the great Hall of Realms of the Buen Retiro Palace, together with other battle paintings by various painters. The Hall of Realms was conceived to exalt the Spanish monarchy and Philip IV.

It is a work of complete technical maturity, in which he found a new way of capturing light. The Seville style has disappeared, and the "Caravaggesque" way of treating illuminated volume is no longer used. The technique becomes so fluid that in some areas the pigment does not cover the canvas, leaving its preparation visible. In this painting Velázquez finished developing his pictorial style. From then on he always painted with this technique, later making only small adjustments to it.

In the scene depicted, the Spanish general Ambrosio Spinola receives the keys of the conquered city from the Dutchman Justin of Nassau. The terms of the surrender were exceptionally lenient, and the defeated were allowed to leave the city bearing their arms. The scene is an invention, since the act of handing over the keys never actually took place.

As he went along, Velázquez modified the composition several times. He erased what he did not like with light superimpositions of color. X-rays make it possible to distinguish many overlapping modifications. One of the most significant concerns the lances of the Spanish soldiers, a key element of the composition, which were added at a later stage. The composition is articulated in depth by means of aerial perspective. Among the Dutch soldiers on the left and the Spaniards on the right, some faces are strongly lit and others are treated in different levels of shadow. Treating the figure of the defeated general with nobility is a way of exalting the victor. On the right, Spinola's horse moves impatiently. Some of the soldiers pay attention while others seem distracted. These small movements and gestures remove the rigidity from the surrender and give it an appearance of naturalness.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Innocent X (1649-51). He drew inspiration from earlier papal portraits by Raphael and Titian, to whom he paid tribute. The figure of the pontiff, sitting upright in his chair against a combination of different tones of red, yellow and white, has great force, which emphasizes the vigor of his face and his severe gaze.

Main article: Portrait of Innocent X

The most acclaimed portrait of the painter's lifetime, which still arouses admiration today, is the one he made of Pope Innocent X. When he painted it on his second journey to Italy, the artist was at the height of his fame and his technique.

It was not easy to get the Pope to sit for a painter, and very few obtained that privilege. Enriqueta Harris believes that the paintings Velázquez brought him as a gift from the King must have put Innocent in a favorable disposition.

He drew inspiration from the Portrait of Pope Julius II that Raphael painted around 1511, and from Titian's interpretation of it in his portrait of Pope Paul III. Both works were very famous and widely copied. In this painting, more than in any other, Velázquez paid tribute to his admired Venetian master, although it is an independent creation: the upright figure in his chair has great force.

With loose brushstrokes, several tones of red are combined, from the farthest to the nearest. In the background is the dark red of the curtain, then the lighter red of the chair, and in the foreground the striking red of the mozzetta with its luminous reflections. Above this setting rises the pontiff's head, with strong features and a severe gaze.

This portrait has always been greatly admired. It has inspired painters of every period, from Neri to Francis Bacon with his tormented series. For Joshua Reynolds this was the finest painting in Rome and one of the foremost portraits in the world.

Palomino said that on his return to Madrid Velázquez brought back a replica (an autograph copy). This is believed to be the version in the Wellington Museum (Apsley House, London). Wellington seized it from the French after the Battle of Vitoria; they in turn had plundered it in Madrid during the War of Independence. Of the many existing replicas, it is the only copy considered to be autograph by Velázquez.

Las Meninas

Main article: Las Meninas

Las Meninas (1656). 318 x 276 cm. This complex canvas is the summit of his painting. The mastery of his light makes the air of the room feel real.

After his second journey to Italy, Velázquez was at the height of his personal and artistic maturity. In 1652 he had been appointed chief chamberlain of the palace (aposentador mayor de palacio), which left him little time to paint. Even so, the few paintings he produced in this last stage of his life are considered exceptional. In 1656 he painted Las Meninas. It is one of the most famous and controversial works of our time. Thanks to Palomino, we know the names of almost all the figures. In the center is the Infanta Margarita, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, or meninas. On the right are two members of the court who had dwarfism, María Bárbara Asquín and Nicolás Pertusato, the latter kicking a dog lying in the foreground. Behind them, in half-light, are a lady's companion and a bodyguard. In the background, in the doorway, stands José Nieto, the Queen's chamberlain. On the left, painting a large canvas that we see from behind, is the painter Diego Velázquez. Reflected in the mirror we can make out the King and Queen, Philip IV and his wife Mariana. This painting was made to be hung in the King's summer office.

For Gudiol, Las Meninas represents the culmination of his pictorial style, the result of a continuous process of simplifying his painting technique that gave visual realism priority over the effects of drawing. In his artistic evolution, Velázquez understood that only a few brushstrokes were needed to capture any form accurately. His broad knowledge of painting technique allowed him to determine which brushstrokes those were. His intuition allowed him to place them in exactly the right spot at the first touch, without repetitions or corrections.

According to Palomino's description, Velázquez used the reflection of the King and Queen in the mirror to reveal ingeniously what he was painting. Several figures look toward the viewer of the painting: the Infanta, the painter, the female dwarf, the guardadamas, the dog, the menina Isabel, and the chamberlain from the door at the back. The viewer thus occupies the focal point where the King and Queen were presumably standing. What Velázquez is painting lies outside the picture, in the viewer's real space. Foucault drew attention to how Velázquez managed to integrate and merge this real space of the viewer with the foreground of the painting, creating the illusion of continuity between the two spaces. He achieved this through the device of strongly lighting the foreground and through the neutral, uniform floor.

Regarding the way Velázquez portrays himself, Julián Gállego, like Charles de Tolnay before him, emphasizes that he does not depict himself in the manual act of applying the brush to the canvas. Instead he shows himself in a more intellectual and noble position, thinking and reflecting on the internal design of the work. For Tolnay it seems as though Velázquez were outside the composition, conceiving and imagining the work at the artist's creative moment. For the first time in Western art, a painter portrayed himself alongside his lords, in the company of members of the royal family. He did so while performing his duties as painter to the chamber and wearing the insignia of his rank. These were the key of valet of the chamber and the cross of the Order of Santiago, the latter perhaps added later and, according to Palomino, by order of the King himself, "for the encouragement of the practitioners of this most noble art". Very eloquent in this respect is the early description by the Portuguese Félix da Costa, included in a treatise on art dated 1696 that remained in manuscript. Costa discussed Las Meninas in connection with the familiar theme of the recognition and honors painters have received from monarchs. He recalled that "To Diego Velázquez, painter, Philip IV, King of Castile, gave the habit of Santiago, which is the first order of that kingdom, and the key of his chamber". According to Costa, the painter used his ingenuity to perpetuate this honor "in a painting in the palace of Madrid, which adorns a room, with the portrait of the Empress, daughter of Philip IV, together with his own". After a brief description, he concluded that "the painting seems more a portrait of Velázquez than of the Empress".

Las Meninas stands out for its balanced composition and its order. In Velázquez, a Baroque painter, an intense classical component still survives: an interest in order and a disdain for the oblique axes of the Baroque. The lower half of the canvas is filled with figures in restrained movement, while the upper half is steeped in a gradually deepening, still half-light. The paintings on the walls, the mirror and the open door at the back form a succession of rectangular shapes. They act as a counterpoint to the subtle play of color created by the poses and movements of the figures.

The composition is articulated by repeating the shape and proportions in the two main trios: Velázquez, Agustina and Margarita on one side, and Isabel, Maribárbola and Nicolasito on the other. Their placement was very carefully thought out and needed no changes along the way. This was unusual for Velázquez, whose way of painting was full of pentimenti and adjustments as the execution of a painting progressed.

The face of the Infanta Margarita is treated with soft shadows and luminous touches that give lightness to her hair and model her figure. The result is one of the finest lighting effects in the artist's work.

Velázquez was a master in the treatment of light. He lit the painting with three independent light sources, not counting the small reflection in the mirror. The most important falls on the foreground from an unseen window on the left. It illuminates the Infanta and her group, making her the principal focus of attention. The large space behind gradually dissolves into half-light. Then, at the back, a new and small light source bursts in from another side window on the right, and its glow falls on the ceiling and the rear part of the room. The third light source is the strong backlighting of the open door at the farthest point, against which the figure of José Nieto is silhouetted. From there the light projects from the back of the painting toward the viewer, forming a diagonal that crosses the painting perpendicularly. This complex web of light fills the space with shadows and backlit areas. It arises from the crossing of this frontal light, running from inside to outside, with the transverse lights mentioned above, and it creates the celebrated Velázquez atmosphere.

For Luis Eusebi, cataloger at the Museo del Prado in 1828, only Velázquez's audacity could dare to place a white hole in the central area of the composition. Its light was so intense that it made the door, the staircase and the person standing on it shine.

The painting is executed in Velázquez's late manner, the one he used after returning from his second journey to Italy. This last stage shows a greater dilution of the pigments and a thinning of the paint layers. The brushstrokes are applied in a carefree, daring and free manner. As Quevedo put it, it is a painting of distant patches, or, in the tradition of Titian, what in Spain was called painting of borrones (blots). Las Meninas was executed quickly and intuitively. This followed Velázquez's habit of painting the motif straight away, from life, directly alla prima and with spontaneity.

The only thing modeled with a certain precision is the dog in the foreground. Behind it the painting becomes simpler, and a few allusions and suggestions are enough. The elimination of elements reaches its maximum in the figures in half-light; the guardadamas is represented by a very vague human shape. The King and Queen in the mirror are painted with sketches of the utmost simplicity. A single movement of the brush served the painter to represent both the reflection of light in the lower part of the mirror and the shape of the King's body. A single light line defines the Queen's headdress.

The sketch-like manner is accompanied by absolute assurance in the gradations. This applies both to those that must suggest differences in the distance of objects and to those that establish differences in the materials represented. To distinguish satin, velvet or flesh he does not need to labor over them; he achieves the precise effect immediately, solely through the way he applies the brushstroke.

He systematically seeks to neutralize the hues, highlighting only certain elements so that chromatic intensity does not predominate overall. In the main group of figures, set against an ochre base, only a few gray and yellowish hues stand out, in contrast to the dark grays of the background and the upper part of the painting. Light, expressive touches of black and red and the rosy whiteness of the flesh complete the harmonious effect. Shadows are used with determination and without hesitation, and they include black. This idea of neutralizing hues predominates in his art. It appears when he defines the backlit figure at the back with a few precise black strokes, and when he captures the true quality of the wood in the paneled door at the back. It also appears when he scatters small white strokes over the Infanta's yellowish skirt, and when he suggests her fine blond hair without even attempting to draw it.

Carmen Garrido pointed out that X-rays of Las Meninas show the speed and ease with which it was executed. In the ground of the canvas, the most widely used pigment is lead white, spread unevenly. The outlines of the figures were made with long, loose strokes. Afterward he applied quick, short touches that bring out the highlights on the faces, hands and details of the garments. The faces appear diffuse, with no physiognomic details defined. The figures were executed in their present position, with hardly any changes and only brief corrections of detail. The most important change seen in the X-rays affects the figure of the painter himself. He originally had his face turned toward the scene, looked younger and was dressed differently. The artist arranged the distribution of light before beginning the scene, placing the area of greatest illumination at the back and setting the chamberlain against that white patch. Infrared reflectography shows no preparatory drawing, only some dark positioning lines along the outlines of the figures and in the paintings on the right-hand wall.

The Fable of Arachne (The Spinners)

Main article: The Fable of Arachne

Velázquez painted The Fable of Arachne for a private client, Pedro de Arce, who belonged to the court. The painting depicts the myth of Arachne, an extraordinary weaver, as described by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. The mortal challenged the goddess Minerva to show that she wove like a goddess. The result was a tie, and it was concluded that Arachne's tapestry was of equal quality to the goddess's. In the foreground of the painting, the goddess and Arachne are seen weaving their respective tapestries. The background depicts a later moment, with the finished tapestries hanging on the walls, when they are declared to be of equal quality. The subject shown on the tapestry, the Rape of Europa, is a further tribute to his masters. Titian painted the original, and Rubens painted the copy that was kept in the royal palace.

The Spinners (1658). The composition is organized in different planes of light and shadow that contrast strongly with one another. For López-Rey, this is the painting in which he achieved his greatest mastery of light. Most of the figures are blurred, defined with quick touches that produce that haziness.

After Velázquez painted it, four strips were added to the four sides of the painting. The top was enlarged by about 50 cm, the right side by about 22 cm, the left by 21, and the bottom by about 10 cm, leaving it finally 222 cm high and 293 wide.

It was executed very quickly on an orange ground using very fluid mixtures. The figures in the foreground are blurred, defined with quick touches that produce that haziness. Farther back this effect increases, and the brushstrokes become shorter and more transparent. On the left he depicts a spinning wheel whose spokes can be made out in a hazy impression of movement. Velázquez heightened this effect by placing touches of light inside the circle that suggest the fleeting reflections of the moving spokes.

He introduced many changes into the composition. One of the most significant is the woman on the left drawing back the curtain, who did not appear in the painting at first. The painting has come down to us in poor condition, which was mitigated by a delicate restoration in the 1980s. For scholars, it is the work in which the color is most luminous and in which he achieved his greatest mastery of light. The contrast between the intense luminosity of the background scene and the chiaroscuro of the room in the foreground is very pronounced. There is another great contrast in the foreground between the luminous figure of Arachne and the shadowed figures of the goddess Minerva and the other weavers.

See also

• Baroque painting
• Spanish Baroque painting

Bibliography

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• Davies, David (1999). "El Primo". Velázquez (in español). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, S.A. ISBN 84-8109-283-5.
• Gállego, Julián (1985). Diego Velázquez (in español). Barcelona: Antropos. ISBN 84-85887-23-9.
• Gállego, Julián (1990). "Catálogo". Velázquez. Catálogo Museo del Prado. Exposición enero-marzo 1990 (in español). Madrid: Museo del Prado. ISBN 84-87317-01-4.
• Garrido Pérez, Carmen (1992). Velázquez, técnica y evolución (in español). Madrid: Museo del Prado. ISBN 84-87317-16-2.
• Gombrich, Ernst Hans (1997). La historia del arte (in español). Madrid: Editorial Debate SA. ISBN 84-8306-044-2.
• Gudiol, José (1982). Velázquez (in español). Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa SA. ISBN 84-343-0353-1.
• Harris, Enriqueta (2006). "Biografía de Velázquez (2002)". Estudios completos sobre Velázquez (in español). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. ISBN 84-934643-2-5.
• Harris, Enriqueta (2006). "Velázquez y Gran Bretaña (1999)". Estudios completos sobre Velázquez (in español). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. ISBN 84-934643-2-5.
• Harris, Enriqueta (1999). "Inocencio X". Velázquez (in español). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, S.A. ISBN 978-84-8109-283-7.
• Hellwig, Karin (1999). La literatura artística española del siglo XVII (in español). Madrid: Visor. ISBN 84-7774-602-8.
• Knox, Gilles (2010). Las últimas obras de Velázquez (in español). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. ISBN 84-93677-63-9.
• Herzer, Alfred (1963). Velázquez (in español). Madrid: Revista de occidente.
• Justi, Carl (1953). Velázquez y su siglo (in español). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
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• Ortega y Gasset, José (1963). "La fama de Velázquez". Velázquez (in español). Madrid: Revista de Occidente SA.
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• Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. (1990). "Velázquez y su arte". Velázquez: Museo del Prado 23 enero-31 de marzo de 1990 (in español). Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura. ISBN 84-87317-01-4.
• Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. (1996). "Escuela española". El Museo del Prado (in español). Madrid: Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado y Fonds Mercator. ISBN 90-6153-363-5.
• Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. (1990). "Velázquez y su arte". Velázquez. Catálogo Museo del Prado. Exposición enero-marzo 1990 (in español). Madrid: Museo del Prado. ISBN 84-87317-01-4.
• Portús, Javier (2004). "Velázquez en primera persona". Velázquez (in español). Milan: RCS Libri S.p.A. ISBN 84-89780-54-4.
• Prater, Andreas (2000). "El Barroco". Los Maestros de la pintura Occidental (in español). Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH. ISBN 3-8228-6794-2.
• Prater, Andreas (2007). Venus ante el espejo. Velázquez y el desnudo (in español). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. ISBN 84-936060-0-6.
• Ragusa, Elena (2004). "La vida y el arte". Velázquez (in español). Milan: RCS Libri S.p.A. ISBN 84-89780-54-4.
• Ragusa, Elena (2004). "Las obras maestras". Velázquez (in español). Milan: RCS Libri S.p.A. ISBN 84-89780-54-4.
• Ragusa, Elena (2004). "Breve antología crítica". Velázquez (in español). Milan: RCS Libri S.p.A. ISBN 84-89780-54-4.
• Salort Pons, Salvador (2002). Velázquez en Italia (in español). Madrid: Fundación de Apoyo a la Historia del Arte Hispánico. ISBN 84-932891-1-6.
• Stoichita, Victor I. (1999). "El retrato del esclavo Juan Pareja: semejanza y conceptismo". Velázquez (in español). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, S.A. ISBN 84-8109-283-5.

External links

• Biography of Velázquez by Enriqueta Harris (on the Museo del Prado website) (in Spanish)
• Jacinto Octavio Picón: Vida y obras de don Diego Velázquez, Text on the Project Gutenberg website.
• Analysis of The Surrender of Breda by Jonathan Brown (on the Museo del Prado website) (in Spanish)
• Analysis of Las Meninas by Calvo Serraller (on the Museo del Prado website) (in Spanish)
• Analysis of The Spinners by Lucas Redondo (University of Valencia) (in Spanish)
• An approach to Velázquez's technique by Rafael Bueno (website of the Junta de Andalucía) (in Spanish)
• Velázquez y Sevilla. Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico (in Spanish)
• Digitized works by Diego Velázquez in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Velázquez, broadcast of June 5, 2018, of Música antigua, a program of Radio Clásica. (in Spanish)